


bats up in this belfry

by mickleborger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Mordin is also there but he's only onscreen for like five seconds, POV Third Person, badbrains Miranda sorry I don't make the rules, ok and maybe there's some Jack/Miranda if you squint because I am A Trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 21:29:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8225321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: "Found several surveillance devices. Destroyed most of them. Returned expensive one to Miranda."





	

It's not as if she sits at her terminal monitoring every single feed; Cerberus has simply not provided her with enough screens for that. She can easily imagine a setup in this room with several terminals and screens, wires coiled on the floor like roots and roping from the ceiling like vines, less office than jungle. But the face of Cerberus cannot be _messy_ , and Henry Lawson's derisive little _humph_ rings in the back of her head, and the closest thing to a jungle here is the green of the armchair cushions she numbly rearranges on her way in.  There is no terminal where there should be one.  There is only a window she hates but can't stop looking out of.

She has a window instead of a monitoring setup and she's busy filing a report and somehow anyway she knows a feed has gone down.  She knows, she knows.  The hacked mechs in front of the clinic told her this would happen.  The clicking of the hand cannon told her.  A mess of wires and alien electronics under a sleepy red light told her.  She doesn't have to check the feeds.  If she's right there's nothing to be done, and if she's wrong there's nothing to do.  She doesn't have to check the--

[ _T12 is offline_ ]

Her hand hovers over the pointer and her lips scrunch up and she wonders if Solus even stopped to put his crap away before getting to that one, if Jacob even noticed what was without a doubt a curious little swatting motion by the door to the CIC.  She can even see the frenetic search-and-destroy tactics the doctor must have used -  _upgrade terminal, very good (crunch)!  lab bench, a bit small (squish).  windows!  structurally (flick) unsound.  supplies, supplies, sup- (fzzt) -plies..._

It's not that she would be anything other than utterly devastated if she were wrong, but, _god_ , does she hate being right sometimes.  The tech lab is off-limits.  That's fine.  That's _fine_.  She'll figure something out.  There's always EDI.  This is fine.  It'll work out.

She's vaguely aware of too much time having passed with her hand still motionless over the keyboard, silently repeating to herself that there is another way, her report on Alchera still not written. _It's an easy report_ , a voice tinier than her problem-response voice cries out piteously against the drumming _fix it fix it fix it_.   _Shepard went down alone.  You just have to confirm that_.

_Fix it fix it fix it fix it BORING fix it fix it fix it fix--_

[ _T12 is offline_ ]

 _Not 'signal has been lost'_ , she gnaws at her bottom lip.  There's no _way_ it turned off on its own.   _The Shepard went down t'Alchera_ , a slightly different tiny voice starts singing.  She shoos it away with a nervous two-finger twitch.  A brilliant salarian scientist who does not immediately pick up on the bugs in his lab would have been disappointing, of course.  A poor investment, considering the number of krogan shotguns she had to get through to recruit him.   _Uncomfortably close_ krogan shotguns.  And Solus an STG agent of undetermined status!  No, no.  It's good he's found the bugs.  He would not have been worth brushing the vorcha blood out of her hair if he hadn't.

But on this ship she saw built from nothing and whose plumbing she can navigate by heart there is an entire room in darkness, and T12 is offline.  Her fingers want to drum on the desk.  The door does not chime.

_They were looking for their crew to find; there were at a loss, and frankly pretty cross, and they-- no, doesn't fit the meter._

She lets out a long _hhhh_ and switches back to the labeled but otherwise blank page of her report. _They were looking for some peace of mind?  We already used looking.  'Looking to find' sounds awful.  Searching to find?  Damnit._

She doesn't know how to talk to someone who doesn't corral their little voices.

The minutes are ticking by and some of them feel like seconds and some of them feel like weeks, and several times she thinks of moving her hands to the actual keys to type up this astonishingly basic report, and every time she stalls.  She looks at a constellation in the very far distance, the one that hasn't changed since the ship turned in this direction.  She thinks about how she would not have seen that star system fifty years ago, and about the cute scarf shop she knows is there now.  She shifts in her chair and rolls her wrist.  She looks back to her report to find it has still not written itself.

_Now they came across this dog-tag of a crewman fresh from basic, and- wait, no.  Hang on.  F--_

She knows all their names as well as she knows the names of her own crew; but she does not know _them_ as she knows her own crew; and, much like the silent tech lab out of which nothing comes, this makes her shudder involuntarily.  The blank page stares at her and all she can think of is this ridiculous buzzing sing-song and of Caroline Grenado whom she knows everything about that a person has the right to know but whose voice nor face she can bring to mind.  She cannot write like this.  Not a standard report like this.   _Especially_ not a report like this, one she cannot fall into, one that is only numbers and what objective things happened when objective time.   _It's only numbers_ , she repeats to herself, tabbing over to the feed to make sure T12 is still offline.  Numbers like Omega, like Illium, like-- well, like everything.  But today numbers are hard.

She needs air, but if she finishes this report later the time-stamp will be wrong, and the Illusive Man will notice; and he may not say anything, but he'll _know_.  She can't leave yet.  She can't let him know.  Her teeth grind.

The report is, in the end that follows twenty minutes later, cold and hollow and exactly the sort of thing she would scream at if she were the sort of incandescent flare she almost-envies deep in the basement of the ship.  Shepard did this.  The site was like so.  No complications.  Her throat is tight as she posts it, her fingers barely remembering the motions they went through.  Her teeth have not stopped grinding.  She still needs air.

She likes doing her rounds - enough to let the crew know they matter, not so much they feel conned into believing the mission does not come first.  Shepard is the one who makes the speeches.  Shepard is the one who cares.  That she cannot get Caroline Grenado's name out of her head is irrelevant.

She ignores lower engineering and comes to the tech lab, very intentionally, last.  Mordin Solus does not look up, and neither of them speaks.  T12 is in a small clear bag by the door.  Miranda makes sure to scan the room before looking straight at it.

Her fingers close on the plastic and she looks back at him.  He is looking up at her.  He smiles that tight-quick salarian smile.  She nods that minuscule human nod.

The tech lab is silent.


End file.
